Rolls-Royce Unveils New Jet Engine … Made of Legos

One of the high-bypass fans of the Lego Trent 1000 during construction.

A few of the complex fan blade designs used in the Lego jet engine.

The half-scale jet engine on display at the Farnborough International Airshow this week.

Some of the Rolls Royce team and Bright Bricks Lego experts that built the model engine.

Airplane engine maker Rolls-Royce unveiled the newest version of its Trent 1000 at the Farnborough International Airshow this week. It doesn’t produce any thrust, but it is a fairly accurate, half-scale model of the real thing. And it’s made entirely of Legos – 152,455 of them, to be exact.

The Lego engine weighs 675 pounds and has a fan diameter of nearly 5 feet compared to the 12,710 pounds and just over 9-foot diameter of the real engine. The Lego model is a cutaway of the Trent 1000 and shows the inner workings of the engine, complete with the complex fan blades up front that provide most of the thrust, to compressor blades and a combustion section can be seen in plastic brick detail.

Rolls-Royce Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stein said the company built the engine to inspire the younger generation. “We are very pleased some of our own graduates and apprentices have contributed to building it, ensuring it is as realistic as possible,” Stein said in a statement. “We hope that this representation of our technology will help to enthuse and inspire the potential scientists and engineers of the future about the career opportunities they could pursue.”

The Lego model isn’t a bad way to make a few headlines during a crowded airshow, either. The entire engine is comprised of more than 160 separate engine components and took a team of four people eight weeks to complete (video below). The big question for a lot of kids will be, How much will the kit cost? It does look like there were quite a few specialty parts, might be worth sticking to simpler, but still very cool Lego aircraft designs.

The English company has a long history in aircraft engines dating back to World War I, and Rolls-Royce traces its jet engine roots back to work with one of the co-inventors of the jet engine, Frank Whittle, in the 1940s.